I’ve had to defer completion of my MA for health reasons and this blog will track my ability to maintain my creative focus over the next few months.
My current research interest is in personal subjectivities and the general question of whether one can be part of a story and at the same time escape narrative.
Well, I am through the hospital part of the treatment for now. For now is a kind of nagging thought that will accompany me for a while but anyhow I have been drawing again.
Time probably to start another blog with a new focus.
It has been all go with DAD stuff. Our film project is effectively a large-scale community project as well as a film. We had about 200 people at a reunion event for former employees of the paper mill, an event which is also part of the film. It was hugely emotional for many of the people there as they caught up with colleagues they hadn’t seen for as many as 50 years in some cases.
We also ran a weekend film workshop for young disabled filmmakers, which resulted in 6 3-minute films, and screened artists’ films in Dover’s Grand Shaft.
So, unsurprisingly, I’ve not done much studio practice. I think though, rather than present the DAD work and the studio practice as being in conflict – it’s more interesting to see both activities as different aspects of practice.
Went to see the Agnes Martin show at Kettles Yard on Saturday. It was wonderful to step out of the heat into the gallery and enjoy the faded colours; the bands of paint which the pencil lines cannot quite contain; little seepages of thin paint cross the line of the pencil mark – betrayals of emotion leaking out.
Driving home the sky was a hazy pale blue divided by a band of endless white cloud; I felt I was driving into one of her paintings.
As Rob says, my health does impact on my work but nonetheless I managed to write a whole paper on autobiography without once mentioning anything to do with health! Although autobiography or the personal can’t help but be in one’s work, I try to keep the direct link to health at arms length. Partly I think this is because although I don’t think artwork can be reduced to autobiography, because it is always more than that, there is a risk of reduction because some viewers look no further. Hence sometimes the need not to be too focused on content. My paper ended up being more about the importance of the viewer’s autobiography in constituting subjectivity and the viewer’s experience of the artwork. The problem of reduction applies not only to autobiography, of course, but to any reading of the content of a piece.
i was at Marine Studios in Margate for their First Friday event, which on this occasion was about natural navigation, – navigating without maps basically and reading the natural world for signs – where I bumped into Rob Turner of “A walk with Cosmo” fame. We chatted a bit about dogs, of course, and then he said he thought my blog was a bit light. It’s quite interesting that and I suppose I’ve tried to keep these posts related to studio practice and since I haven’t really done alot of studio practice there’s not been much to write.
One of the first things I did when diagnosed was get my hair cut short in preparation for losing it all – and I mean all. I also decided I’d dress my way through it so tried to be stylish – got some nice hats – and got some outfits together, which isn’t to say there weren’t days of staying in and wearing the most depressing of tracksuits. Days of not doing anything much except sleep, but it was days not weeks, so I’ve been lucky. Everyone has said how well I’ve looked, all the way through; maybe it’s true but in some photos I definitely look ill and I definitely have been ill. Got some passport photos done yesterday in one of those booths and the result was pretty ghastly.
As I’m someone who lives very much in my head, I’ve just kept working – DAD stuff and my thesis which was a great chance to experiment with personal criticism: writing that weaves the personal into the theoretical. With that as with this blog, I’ve had to think about the issue of boundaries and limits: what do I choose to reveal, disclose, make public? What do I keep private? What is relevant in terms of my practice?
The body places limits: fatigue, stiffness, lack of strength, pain, all conspire to frustrate desire, ambition, plans. Drawing for me is where the body can be acknowledged in a non-heady way. My impossible heaps of lines are kind of growths and the final shape emerges as I draw; I think the process is close to the genesis that Klee refers to: “The work of art too is first of all, genesis: it is never experienced purely as result.”
This drawing is breast-like though I did not design it in advance to be like that. However, I quite like the fact that it is.
Clare Smith's mixed English/Chinese heritage informs her perspective on issues of identity and categorisation. Her nomadic childhood and early adulthood have meant a somewhat ambivalent relationship to place, reinforced by the sense of ambiguity that comes from her mixed identity. Smith works with drawing, print media, collage and moving image to investigate this ambivalence, with references to craft, the importance of labour and the handmade. Through her choice of materials and approaches, she creates work which attempts to create a sense of unity, an interpretation of Homi Bhabha's "Third Space" - seen as a space in which different parts can come together to challenge dominant ideas of wholeness. Collaboration is part of Smith’s practice and she is also co-founder of Dover Arts Development (DAD) together with painter, Joanna Jones. This involves working with many different artists, curation, organisation, event management, creating networks across East Kent and influencing the public realm in Dover. Clare works from a studio in Dover. She has an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins and has exhibited nationally and internationally.
